#polyaenus

If I recall correctly (and I can be very wrong in this) Arrian used Ptolemy’s book as one of his main primary sources. Did any bits of it survive that are useful to modern historians?

Ptolemy Soter's History of Alexander

@akriticsongs, first, yes, Arrian used Ptolemy, along with Arisobulos, as his two chief sources for his own history. These weren’t all he used, and he certainly editorialized on them, giving his own opinions throughout. We shouldn’t take his history as a “cut-and-paste” version of theirs. That makes getting back to theirs a bit of a struggle.

One reason Arrian gives for using Ptolemy is that he was a king, and it wouldn’t do for a king to lie.

That assessment may make modern historians crack up laughing—as it should. But we must also recognize that Arrian isn’t simply being obtuse; his history was written to flatter his patron—the Emperor Hadrian. A king. Not just a king, but a king with a noted fondness for Greek culture and Greek philosophy—the first emperor to wear a beard after Greek fashion.

Was Arrian being serious about his claim? Well…probably not, although he also wasn’t playing the same sort of inside-out “I’m going to compliment you in order to insult you” games Virgil played with Augustus in his The Aeneid. Nonetheless, and whatever he says, I doubt he took Ptolemy’s history entirely uncritically.

I am not an expert on Arrian. There have been a couple of really good assessments of Arrian as an historian published recently: V. Liotsakis’s Alexander the Great in Arrian’s Anabasis (2019) and D. W. Leon’s Arrian the Historian: Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire (2021). The links go to their Bryn Mawr reviews. The former is more inclined to analysis of passages while the latter casta a wider net to place Arrian in context as a historian. I like both, as they do different things.

Getting back to Ptolemy’s original, Tim Howe speculated that Ptolemy was influenced by Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern tradition in the book we coedited, Macedonian Legacies (2009), “Alexander in India: Ptolemy as Near Eastern Historiographer.” And more recently, he edited an entire collection, Ptolemy I Soter: a Self-Made Man (ed., Tim Howe, 2018).

It’s too bad we don’t still have Ptolemy’s original history, for two reasons. It would be the only surviving contemporary account, and it could illustrate how later Roman-era historians parsed and refitted earlier histories to their own takes.

My personal first choice of Hellenistic-era writings I’d like to see recovered would be Marsyas’s works on ancient Macedonia (and Alexander). But after that would be Ptolemy’s history. Both would provide us with pre-Roman views of Macedon and Alexander. We don’t have that. The first Macedonian writing about Alexander (et al.) that survives (Strategemata) is late imperial military historian Polyaenus, who wrote a little after Arrian (during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, not Hadrian). There are recent debates as to whether he’s really Macedonian, but even if he was, c. 500 years separated him from his country’s most famous son. And if he calls himself a Macedonian, he was born and raised in Bithynia, and later lived in Rome, so how “Macedonian” he was would be a good question to ask. Like a lot of writers of or influenced by the Second Sophistic, he engaged in a fair bit of Hellenic beautification.

Sovereignty and divinity are inextricable, according to the cult of kingship born in Phrygia. To a remarkable degree, sacred knowledge (the prophetic gift of the mother of Midas, and her instructions to Gordius) and ritual practice (the rites and ceremonies established by Midas, and especially their distinctive music) are in essence sovereignty itself. This is implicit in the story of the kingship of Midas as told by Arrian, and it is explicit in the conclusion to the same tale in Justin’s account, where Midas “filled Phrygia with religious cults, and this, throughout his life, protected him more effectively than could an armed guard.” 

Cult practice and the exercise of sovereignty are still more graphically linked in an account of the means by which Midas extended his dominion. The story is related among the military stratagems collected by Polyaenus:

Midas, pretending that he was going to perform rites for the Great Gods, led out the Phrygians in the night with auloi, tympana, and cymbals, and with hidden swords. Townspeople came out of their houses to see the procession; those who were playing the tympana and cymbals slew the spectators as they came into the streets, took possession of their houses, which lay open, and proclaimed Midas tyrant.

This tale has no specific setting, and therefore describes no particular historical event of the reign of Midas. Rather, it describes a concept underlying his kingship, or irresistible tyranny: his ritual procession is conquest. Opening one’s door to the spectacle of the Mother’s rites is prelude to subjection to the king who celebrates those rites. The result is the appropriation of conquered land, and the tyranny of Midas.

Implicit in this tradition is the idea that the rituals that made Midas great could be adopted by others to their benefit, but always with a sense that the resulting strength or prosperity was due to ritual practices that originated in the cult of the Phrygian Mother. Polyaenus tells a similar story of Artemisia, queen of Caria in the time of Xerxes, who captured the city of Latmus by deploying the musical and enthusiastic rites of a procession of the Mother of the Gods. 

Nicolaus of Damascus tells a story of dynastic rivalry among the Neleid rulers of Miletus, in which Phrygian rites play a similar role. The ruling king, Leodamas, was slain by a rival, and Leodamas’ children and supporters fled from Miletus to Assesus, where they were besieged by their enemies. Appealing to an oracle for advice, they were told to await the arrival of “helpers from Phrygia, who would exact vengeance for the murder of Leodamas and deliver the Milesians from their troubles.” In due course two young Phrygian men arrived bringing a “covered basket containing sacred objects of the Cabeiri.” They declared that they had been sent by a god’s command to convey sacred objects from Phrygia for the benefit of the people at Assesus and Miletus. The Phrygians were welcomed at Assesus by the Milesians, who “vowed to institute the sacred objects among themselves and grant them honors” if they achieved success. Thereupon the Phrygians performed their customary rituals, and ordered the Milesians “to arm themselves, and to march en masse against their enemies, while the sacred objects were conveyed in front of their phalanx.” Upon their doing these things, a “god-sent terror” fell on their foes, who were routed and slaughtered, and strife was brought to an end at Miletus.

A march of conquest, once again, is depicted as a ritual procession, and the story, moreover, legitimizes the foundation of a Phrygian cult at Miletus. In Nicolaus’ day, in the reign of Augustus, the province of Asia had adopted on its coinage the cista mystica, the “mystic basket” alluded to in this story of early Miletus, as the symbol of its unity and prosperity under the hand of divine providence. This was the container of the mystic sacred objects that were both from Phrygia and of the Cabeiri, uniting the rites of the Mother of the Gods with those observed on Samothrace. Among neighboring peoples as well, conveyance of such a revered ritual talisman at the head of an army, accompanied by enthusiastic music, was an ancient manner of displaying sovereign power.  .... The myth-historical context underlying all of these accounts is the endowment of sovereign tyranny to Midas by the Mother, his mother. Midas was the prototypical conqueror, invoked as Lord and Leader of the Host in the archaic Midas Monument. The same monument indicates what later Greek and Latin sources affirm, namely that the rites of the Phrygian Mother were both the means and the justification for his irresistible tyranny. As a cult place dedicated to the memory of Midas and the Mother, the Midas Monument represented one of several places where tyranny was evoked by those who sought to exercise it. As opposed to the portable sacred objects that could be used to transplant the power of tyranny, as was done at Miletus or in Sicily, the rock-cut Midas Monument displayed the basis of sovereign power as a feature of the Phrygian landscape, in the highlands where the chief rivers of western Asia arose, in the native land of Midas’ tyranny. Like the story Herodotus tells attesting the power of the claim that the Phrygians were “the first of mankind,” that the word for bread was first spoken in Phrygia, and, as other sources attest, that Lityerses invented agriculture in that land, the lore of Phrygia asserted that this land was the native home to the greatest king the world had ever known. Anyone who sought sovereign power after Midas’ day, according to this ideology, had to acquire it from the source.”  

It was put out by Ares Publishers, who have a rather isolated list, in large part due to the age of the guy in charge. He's just not web-savvy. But it has some good stuff, reasonably priced, so definitely worth knowing about them. There's a new translation of Polyaenus from them. They also handle The Ancient World periodical, which has quite a few issues devoted to Alexander. But the site is so 1990s, it can be a nightmare to sift through their catalogue.